The Telegraph's James Hurley puts forward furniture manufacturer and retailer
Vitsoe, a firm where innovation means much more than newness.

James Hurley: Innovation tends to bring to mind the shiny and the new. But if Mark Adams, boss of furniture manufacturer and retailer Vitsoe is to be believed, it can also involve ensuring that good, established ideas are adapted to keep them relevant.

The company was founded by Danish entrepreneur Niels Vitsoe in 1959 to market a shelving system invented by Dieter Rams, the German industrial designer renowned for the classic gadgets he produced with the consumer products firm Braun.

Mr Adams, the company’s managing director, acquired a struggling Vitsoe in the Nineties and relaunched it as a UK manufacturer of adaptable shelves.

Innovation at Vitsoe is all about improving on original ideas. “Niels and Dieter’s vision for this company was to create furniture that would last,” says Mr Adams. “That very simple vision was to encourage customers to start with it, to stick with it, to add to it, to take it with them when they moved house, to rearrange it.”

Such talk of “sustainability” is fashionable today. But Vitsoe was founded in the Fifties, in the era of “planned obsolescence”. “We cannot make a product that no longer fulfils its function,” says Mr Adams. “We make it to the best quality so it will last as long as possible.”

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Vitsoe’s job is to persuade consumers to buy something that costs more money but that will last a lifetime because it can be adapted, refurbished and maintained. However, its maxim of “living better with less” might seem at odds with most companies’ mission to flog as much as possible.

So to make this work, Mr Adams has applied these founding ideals across his operation. Biodegradable starch pellets rather than polystyrene are used for packaging and, after delivery, everything that can be reused is returned to the factory.

Dealings with suppliers start with the question, “Shall we do this properly... for the long term?”

Vitsoe is innovative because it constantly reinvents the products it sells, its operations, even the way it raises finance. Rather than using a bank, the firm is investigating the option of borrowing from its own customers and suppliers by offering them a bond.

The company has stores in London, New York and Munich but the vast majority of sales are made online. “Vitsoe is a dotcom in disguise,” says Mr Adams. The stores are simply there to build “trust” in the products.

Vitsoe has designed its own online system so that quotes and design suggestions can be given to customers within minutes of an inquiry being made. This helps make the business the opposite of a cold, faceless web operation that’s churning out repeat orders. “In all my years at Vitsoe, we have never sold the same order twice,” Mr Adams says.

Vitsoe’s operational focus is also on building processes that will last because they can be easily adapted. Mr Adams says: “If you design a well-thought-out system, that allows a product to be updated all the time, one part can be taken out and another added in without disrupting the whole. By constantly understanding changes in the world around you, the system can develop and improve.”

He adds: “We have worked very hard over the years to develop our processes, our own software and techniques, to allow closeness with the customer. That’s not there to be quaint; it’s because it’s the right way of giving customers excellent service and products. If our customers love us, they tell other potential customers about us.”

While the furniture isn’t cheap, costs have been reduced by moving manufacturing to the UK and tweaking production facilities.

And, like its furniture, Mr Adams wants the company to be still standing when he’s moved on. He’s planning to give the company to the employees through an ownership trust.

Vitsoe has recently branched out into new products – or rather, re-engineered versions of forgotten design classics – and has been granted exclusive permission to an entire portfolio of Rams’s furniture designs.

For a recent redesign of a Rams-designed chair, Mr Adams says the firm investigated 50 years’ worth of chairs to find what worked and what didn’t. He says: “It’s been almost a conservation and restoration exercise as well as an industrial design and developmental exercise to get to the point we have reached.”

The Telegraph’s James Hurley is an authority on entrepreneurs and small and fast-growth businesses. He is a former editor of Growing Business magazine and the Startups.co.uk website. In 2012, he won the Enterprise Journalist of the Year category at the Santander Media Awards.

Will King: I love companies like Vitsoe. Design, engineering and longevity is firmly at the forefront of its commercial aesthetic. Since 1959 it has remained totally focused on its product offer.

Above all, Vitsoe products are extremely useful. They are all made with great manufacturing honesty, they are durable, and they have been built with the environment in mind (they last and last!).

One of my favourite quotations is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” and this reflects Vitsoe perfectly.

Will King is the founder of King of Shaves, a shaving products business.